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Reusing Content: Derivative Work vs Modified Work

Started by Ddonat · 10 months ago

What constitutes a derivative work?
The US Copyright Office states:
A typical example of a derivative work [..] is primarily a new work but incorporates some previously published material. This previously published material makes the work a derivative work under the copyright law. To be copyrightable, a derivative work must be different enough from the original to […] ... Continue reading »

6 comments

  • Bryan Rieger

    10 months ago

    Interesting question - but I'm not so sure this is a technology problem, but rather a cultural and/or legal one. IMO a technology solution to this would likely result in DRM being required on all hardware and software for this to work - which REALLY scares me.
    reply
  • Ddonat

    10 months ago

    Hey Bryan,

    Well, I actually agree. I am not advocating technology controls.

    I am wondering if it would be useful for a technology to understand "Yes this is a Derivative work", but it seems to me that "derivative or not" must be a human input piece of metadata. Technology can't define a Derivative work.

    However technology can determine if it is modified, and as such "Yes this is a modified work" could be a system generated piece of metadata.

    Is it worth it to a content creator to know if content is modified or not?
    reply
  • Blaise Alleyne

    10 months ago

    I'm no lawyer,but I've taken an interest in this sort of thing.

    All of those cases are clearly derivative works, except maybe image 3. The Creative Commons tends not to view a picture in a page of text as a derivative work, where as the Free Software Foundation (with the GNU Free Documentation License) believes that would constitute a derivative work. Which of them is right has yet to be seen, and would depend on the theories being tested in court. Or so I've been told.

    I don't see how there's any question as to whether a cropped image is legally a derivative work. I think the real question you're asking is about transformative use. I think there's a strong argument that image 1 is transformative, whereas it would be harder to say the same about image 4. Image 3, if considered a derivative of the original, is also clearly transformative.
    reply
  • Blaise Alleyne

    10 months ago

    In other words, I think you're inventing the distinction between modified and derivative works. That's not a legal distinction, to the best of my knowledge.

    There is, however (at least in the US), a distinction between non-transformative and transformative derivative works.
    reply
  • Ddonat

    10 months ago

    Great insights, Blaise. Thanks.

    From the link on Wikipedia, the way I read Transformative use would imply all of these images are transformative use. I too am no lawyer.

    However, I am not trying to make a legal distinction. I'm more interested in content mark-up/metadata for content that is being reused. I think it is valuable to KNOW if a work I'm looking at is a derivative of another work. And although it may not be clear in my post, I'm trying to figure out:
    1. If there are any hard rules for defining a work "Derivative". If so a system can define and then auto generate the metadata Work=Deriviative versus Work=Original. It seems to me that Derivative is likely a user generated field.

    2. But there are easily defined rules for Modified work. However, is that useful metadata? Work=modified?
    reply
  • Kelli

    10 months ago

    Why make a distinction between modified and derivative work? Why not call it all modified or all derivative work?
    reply

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